Zooey Deschanel on Saturday Night Live: Adorkable or Tweepulsive?

Your devotedNew Girlrecapperswere moonlighting last night as Zooey DAY-shun-ell (who knew? Your recappers, or at least your male recapper, thought it was Deh-shun-ELL) hostedSaturday Night Live.Would Max Greenfield make a guest appearance? Our hopes were as high as Deschanel’s hair.

After an opening sketch featuring Jason Sudeikis’s not-very-interesting impression of Mitt Romney which is amusing only because, at the end, his dog seemingly goes off script and won’t stop barking, Deschanel is introduced wearing a bright red babydoll dress with little pink hearts on it. She sings a song about her significant other forgetting Valentine’s Day and lamely trying to compensate.

Bruce: It was hard to tell if by wearing such an exaggeratedly girlish dress Deschanel was being ironic, or just being herself. Or is being ironic being herself. Or is it calculated showbiz “schtick?” Can a 32-year-old woman like baby-doll dresses with pink hearts purely and unaffectedly? (At home, when no one’s looking, does she wear Armani and Calvin Klein?) Whatever its level of authenticity, I wonder how Deschanel will tweak her persona as she matures. Will cartoon girlishness wear as well at 52?

But these are weighty questions for an-as-yet-brunchless Sunday morning. The forgetting-Valentine’s-Day song was funny, I thought. There was a hint of Adam Sandler, but without the smarm. There was a hint of Victoria Jackson, too, but without the splits and nascent right-wing politics.

Juli: I wish that barking dog had been the musical guest instead of Karmin (we’ll get to Karmin later). I liked Deschanel’s song, too. I will say that Deschanel, who is, again, 32-years-old, has the cadences, inflection, and body language of an overly ambitious child actor auditioning for Annie.

In her first sketch Deschanel plays a conservative TV viewer offended by M.I.A.’s obscene gesture during last weekend’s Super Bowl halftime show.

Bruce: In character as a Midwestern mom, Deschanel did a great Michelle Bachmann voice—that had to have been a deliberate echo. I think this might be the first time I’ve ever seen her not essentially playing a version of herself.

Juli: Yes! Zooey Deschanel can play Midwestern evangelical! Who knew? Without her signature 60s-style hair, she really did look a lot like Katy Perry.

Bruce: And Marion Cotillard (cf. the Parisian bistro dance scene)!

Deschanel is in many more sketches. The pop duo Karmin is the musical guest. An only mildly amusing filmed parody of Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl Chrysler commercial is reprised twice to diminishing, irritating returns.

Bruce: Overall, I thought it was a strong episode. There wasn’t really a great must-see sketch, to my taste (well, maybe “We’re Going to Make Technology Hump”), but pretty much everything, aside from the opener and the Eastwood parodies, was solid, smartish, and funny. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was everything with Deschanel in it, aside from Weekend Update. She was clearly a game host and proved herself an excellent sketch comic, which is a very particular skill and not always something even very talented actors or very funny performers in other genres can pull off. So big huzzahs or kittens and cupcakes for Deschanel! Bring her back, Lorne Michaels.

Juli: Oh my God, Bruce! I’m so shocked Nic Cage and Nic Cage, played by Nic Cage and Andy Samberg, respectively, did not make your best-of list. I laughed so much. My favorite part: when Nic Cage lists the two essential qualities of any classic Nic Cage movie, which are, one, that all the dialogue is either screamed or whispered, and two, everything in the movie is on fire. The whole of the Eastwood parodies was greater than the sum of its parts: the first one wasn’t funny—some lazy political jokes—but by the third (fourth? seventeenth?), Eastwood became way angrier and his product placements way more absurd. Seeing Bill Hader with his pants so high and his squinting so mean-spirited made me miss his Herb Welch, the best S.N.L. character of the last five years.

Bruce: The quirky girls TV show sketch—with Abby Elliott doing an excellent Zooey Deschanel, and Deschanel doing an excellent Mary-Kate Olsen and Taran Killam stealing the scene with his Michael Cera (Kristen Wiig was also very funny as Björk)—suffered only from having followed the somewhat similar conceit, on Weekend Update, of having Andy Samberg play Nicholas Cage next to the real Nicholas Cage. (No Max Greenfield, alas.) But I liked when the quirky girls all made their eyes big to hula music, or was it an Yma Sumac record? Same quirky difference! I didn’t like it when the writers “borrowed” an old Charles Addams gag and had Björk knitting a sweater for an octopus.

Juli: I had a lot of problems with this sketch. For one, I don’t think Abby Elliott does such a good Deschanel: her voice isn’t throaty and plaintive enough; the impression falls in that strange middle-place between caricature and simulacrum. Two, Mary-Kate Olsen hasn’t looked like that in probably seven years. This was no fault of Deschanel’s, whose impression of a tiny, tired person was competent, but the writers don’t seem to be familiar with the severe and minimalist Mary-Kate of today. Those two things just sort of gave the sketch a sloppy quality. Taran Killam, on the other hand, is maybe the most underrated and underutilized performer on the entire show.

One non–Zooey Deschanel observation, or really a question: why did Amy Heidemann of Karmin squat like she was giving birth in the wild every time she rapped?